


Bad As Me

by non_canonical



Category: Being Human, Being Human (UK)
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, Flashbacks, Gen, Hallucinations, Non-Graphic Violence, Original Character Death(s), Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 22:03:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/non_canonical/pseuds/non_canonical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If they'd talked like this while Cutler was still alive, things might not have turned out the way they did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bad As Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shaitanah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shaitanah/gifts).



> _Being Human_ belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC.  Title taken from Tom Waits.

  
'Time is fluid here,' said the demon.  
\- Neil Gaiman, _Other People_

 

There's no pain, and that's a surprise – a pleasant one, but definitely a surprise.  Cutler opens his eyes.  There's no blood on his shirt front, no skin oozing off ruined flesh.  His hands are pink and undamaged, and he sends one groping awkwardly between his shoulder blades.  There's no stake, not even a hole where it hammered through his ribs.  Nothing.  He ought to be glad, but that was his pain, his death, his last grand gesture.  That was him making history – well, trying to, anyway – and he can't help feeling cheated now that it's been taken away from him.

Cutler's in a corridor.  He recognises it from his first, fleeting visit, when they dragged him, screaming, through it.  The men with sticks and ropes.  The ones who forced him out into the cruel brightness of the world again.  The corridor stretches into infinity – or eternity: he's not clear on how any of this works – an endless succession of doors.  There's probably some sort of punishment waiting behind each one of them, his own little corner of hell.  He's probably supposed to choose one.  But Cutler's had enough of playing by other people's rules.

He fiddles with his phone, but the afterlife, it seems, has no mobile reception.  He slouches against the wall; he picks at his nails.  He checks his phone again, just in case that was some temporary problem the last time around, but the thing is dead – as dead as he is – and he never imagined the afterlife would be so boring.  Cutler's never been good at making his own entertainment.  He shrugs and reaches for a door handle.

"Cutler."

He whirls.  He wants to rush forwards, to feel solid flesh under his fingers – to anchor it in his arms – but he remembers the last time, the embrace that was cold and stiff, and distinctly one-sided.

"Is it really you?" Cutler asks.  And that's Hal, all right, laughing at him as he gapes in confusion.

But it can't be Hal.  Because Cutler is here to be punished – hasn't earned anything else – and, no matter how many times he might have claimed that the man made his life a misery, there's no way that he's going to be allowed to spend eternity with Hal Yorke.  And Cutler's not desperate enough to socialise with an hallucination.  Not yet.  He steps into the room and closes the door in Hal's face.

"Did you really think it would be that easy?" Hal grins.

Of course not.  Of course Hal is capable of being out there and in here, all at the same time.  Whoever is in charge of this place must have sent him – him, it, whatever – to be Cutler's personal tormentor.

"So what happens next?" Cutler asks.

"A little trip down memory lane," Hal tells him.  He's peering at something over Cutler's shoulder.  "Have you forgotten?"

Cutler turns – and, no, he hasn't forgotten, not this: his first kill.  Pleading eyes and a wedding photograph on the mantelpiece.  He never found out her name.  Fergus has gone to bring the car round, leaving Cutler alone with her.  He's supposed to be cleaning up, but he stands and stares, and in the deathly quiet he can hear the crackle of bridges burning.  She's sprawled on the bed, not moving, never moving again, no matter how much he might hope – and he can't bear to look at her.  At it.

Cutler flees.  He gulps in the cold, thin air of the corridor, and he lets the wall support his weight.  Hal's still here, watching him, his face splitting into a smile – the sadistic sod always found Cutler's suffering entertaining.

"I didn't want to kill her," Cutler whispers.

"Then why did you do it?"

"Fergus was there.  He made me …"  Cutler falters.  "Or he'd have told you, and –"

"Ah, so it's my fault," Hal says.  "What a monster I am."  Cutler's getting tired of that mocking grin; he wrenches open another door.

A spring day.  The sun is shining and the birds are singing – it's pretty, he supposes, if you like that sort of thing.  Which he doesn't, and certainly not this day of all days, when he's standing on the path that leads up to that bloody B&B.  Cutler knows where this is heading, and he thinks he might just skip the part where he rings the bell and they don't let him in.  And he'll give the rest of it a miss as well: he already knows what it feels like when your flesh starts cooking.  He backs up so abruptly he almost treads on Hal's toes.

"Is that a piece of melted skin on your lapel?" Hal asks, and if this is Cutler's private hell, then why can't it just stay private? "That was hardly your best idea."

"I was doing it for –"  But Cutler won't give the man any more ammunition.  "At least I managed something you've never done.  I stood up to Mr Snow."

Hal simply grins at that, which is when Cutler knows – knows beyond any doubt – that this is not Hal Yorke.  But that's all right: if he isn't real, then it doesn't matter that he isn't impressed, isn't proud, that he doesn't acknowledge what Cutler achieved.  If he isn't real, then neither is the sting of rejection.

Another door, another memory.  He's been summoned to Hal's office.  Cutler flinches at the sight of him, because one Hal is bad enough and he's really not sure that he can cope with two.  But, when he turns to look behind him, the other Hal is gone.  

The man behind the desk grins up at him.  "Why are you here, Cutler?" he asks.  And isn't that what they'd all like to know?

Door after door, and any one of them is as good – or as bad – as any other.

A dingy cellar.  Broken crates; piles of ash; twisted manacles.  A crushing emptiness.  Cutler turns to look at Hal and, even if he isn't real, then at least he's here – and suddenly that's better than nothing.  He stares at the abandoned evening clothes, and it occurs to him that the Hal he thought he knew might have been nothing more than an illusion, too.

Door after door, and they all look the same on the outside.  But this one opens onto darkness and the reek of blood – blood that he didn't recognise at the time.  Cutler's stomach gives an old, reflexive heave, and the breath pants, fierce and dry, in his lungs.  He slams the door shut again and his hands tremble.

"You can't run away from it," Hal tells him.  Perhaps he can't, but he's going to give it a damn good try.

Another door, another room.  Their bedroom – his and Rachel's – but the mattress is rolled up and the furniture is shrouded in dust sheets.  Cutler perches on the bedstead with a piece of wood in his hand.  A car horn blares, echoing through the empty house, and Cutler startles to his feet.  The stake clatters to the floor and he finds he doesn't have the strength to pick it up again.  But Hal is out there, engine running, fingers drumming on the steering wheel: impatient; angry.  It wouldn't take much to provoke him, and Cutler would hardly be the first vampire he's killed.  He sinks back onto the bed.

Footsteps thunder up the stairs; Cutler braces.  But Hal slips an arm around his shoulders, and shushes him like a child, and it's so rare, so unexpected, that Cutler finds himself powerless against it.  He surrenders to that warm pressure.

"Come on," Hal murmurs.  "It's time to go."  So they go.

But, once they're out in the corridor, that grin is back, and Cutler shrugs out of the man's grip.  He needs to keep moving.  But he can't move fast enough to get away from Hal.

They're in Cutler's office this time.  Hal's over near the window, peering at Cutler's model cars, and he cringes at the thought of what Hal's likely to say.  Maybe he could distract him, but there's a very persistent werewolf trying to get his attention.  Just a dumb kid, but he's going to ruin all of Cutler's plans.

"There are people who need to see me do this," he finds himself shouting.  He has no doubt that Hal is watching.

"You really did want to do something for me," Hal sneers.  "I'm touched."  He places a hand in the area where his heart would be, if he actually had one.  He doesn't seem to realise that Cutler's doing it all for him – or maybe he doesn't care.  Either way, Cutler's had enough of this little scene.

Inevitably, Hal is already waiting outside.  Cutler slams the door behind him, anyway, and Hal winces theatrically.  

"That keeps happening," Hal says.  But he isn't real, and talking to himself is a habit that Cutler's trying to break.

A white tablecloth; silver cutlery; discreetly attentive waiters.  The warm heaviness of food and wine.  A pleasant lull between courses; a lull between the storms of this life they lead.  Hal's showing no signs of wanting to eat the other diners, just the food – and the steak is good, very good.  It almost holds the relish it did when Cutler was alive.

Hal smiles, something that doesn't happen enough.  He reaches for his cigarettes and sighs out smoke.  That unruly hair is falling across Hal's forehead again, and Cutler has an urge to brush it back.  He wants to stay here, to let Hal play the raconteur, to listen to the stories of his misadventures in Brazil.  But Hal grins – "Was life with me really so awful?" Hal asks – and of course this moment couldn't last.  

Another door opens on blackness.  It's that place again: the waiting darkness, heavy with blood – and Cutler can't deal with this – not now, not yet.  He gulps down bile, and tears, and something that might be shame.

"Who are you mourning?" Hal asks him.  "Rachel or yourself?"  

Hal was always at his most infuriating when he was right.

Another door; another killing room, but he can steel himself against this lesser horror.  Hal is taking a man apart, one piece at a time: vivisection, if a vampire is considered to be alive.  He's alive enough to feel pain, and that's what Hal cares about.  Cutler doesn't question why his maker was cruellest to his own kind.  Their own kind.

Hal pauses to admire his handiwork.  "This sort of thing requires a steady hand," he says, and his grin blossoms hideously.  "And attention to detail."

Doors; rooms; slices of Cutler's life.  Hal taking him apart, one piece at a time, leaving him nothing he can call his own – not even his name.  Nick becomes Cutler, and Hal has Cutler's car towed away for scrap.  Hal tells Cutler to get rid of all his old suits.  Hal forces Cutler to give up his home.

Cutler walks through a door: his front door when he still had a place to call his own.  He takes his sharp new suit off and flings it on the floor.  Rebellion; a nostalgic burst of satisfaction.  Hal and his fancy tailors be damned.  Cutler slips into old pyjamas and his down-at-heel slippers, and he brews a pot of tea.  Then he rushes to hang the suit up – if there's one thing Hal can't abide, it's wrinkles – ready for the morning when he'll put it back on.  He always puts it back on.

Sunday afternoon, with a bucket and chamois leather, cleaning the big new Ford that Hal decided on.  The sun shines on polished chrome and the neighbours' envy.

"There's blood in the boot."  Hal winks.  "Mind you don't get caught."

There is blood inside the boot, but the thrill it gives him isn't entirely fear.

Hal's office again: Cutler and Fergus waiting to hear who will oversee Wyndham's visit.  Cutler can do this, he knows he can, and Hal must know it, too.  So he fidgets in his chair, and he waits for Hal to give the word, to give him his approval, to trust him to get the job done.  He waits for Hal's blessing – even now, even though he knows it's never going to come.

"You seem disappointed," Hal observes.  And yes – well spotted, Sherlock bloody Holmes – he is disappointed.  More than that, he's furious: at Hal and at himself.  He stalks off down the corridor, but Hal is right behind him.

"Why don't you just leave me alone?" Cutler yells.

"Do you want me to?"

It might just take the rest of eternity to answer that one.

Fergus and Cutler clink their glasses together.  A toast; a wake, of sorts.

"To Hal," Fergus says.

"To Hal," Cutler echoes.  If he chokes a little, it's just the whisky, not the strange surge of affection he feels for his maker now that he's gone.  "He wasn't so bad, was he?"

"He was a bastard," Fergus smiles.  "But he was a likeable bastard."

Through another door, and Cutler finds himself in the pub.  They're all there: Hal and his boys, and they are all boys – all men – even though Cutler's met enough vampires by now to know that some of them are of the female persuasion.  But never in Hal's little circle.  Not that Cutler points it out, but he can't help noticing.  And noticing.  And refusing to draw conclusions.

They're getting ready to tackle the wolf pack that's set up home on their patch.  Hal's giving them a speech, the sort of once-more-unto-the-breach kind of thing that gets the testosterone surging, and there's only so much sweaty masculinity that Cutler can stomach.  But there's a glint in Hal's eye, and something so irresistible, so infectious, about his smile that Cutler finds himself –

Shit, Hal's caught him staring.  "You did that a lot," Hal tells him.  He makes it sound like a question.

"You enjoyed it," Cutler retorts.  It isn't an answer, and they both know it.

Cutler opens a door into darkness.  He shouldn't be surprised, because, no matter how far he tries to leave this place behind, he keeps finding himself back here.  This time Hal slips ahead of him.  Cutler would swear that he can feel Louis and Dennis right behind him, a wall of unyielding muscle, hands reaching to hold him in place, and he lurches back before his feet can cross the threshold.  Before Hal can turn on the lights.

Hal just had to go and turn on the fucking lights, to force Cutler to look.  He forced Cutler to do a lot of things.

"You're still blaming me for everything."  Hal's voice echoes down the corridor, but Cutler's sick of all this bullshit and he keeps on moving.  He has to keep moving.

But apparently there's nowhere he can go that Hal can't follow, and the man's grin turns feral as they walk into the cell.  There are nothing but hard surfaces here: the tiles, the bench, Hal's teeth.  The door clangs shut.  Hal's eyes flood to black and he's there – right there – pinning Cutler with a strength that just isn't human, and Cutler screams as he loses control of his bladder.  But, this time, there's no tearing agony.  This time, Hal stops, and cocks his head.

"What if I'd given you a choice?" Hal asks.  It's not the hand around his throat that stops Cutler from answering.

This time, when Cutler stumbles out into the corridor, he has a question of his own: "Why me?"

"Why anyone?" Hal replies.  "And why then?"

Cutler doesn't know for certain, but he has a nasty suspicion.  There were five years between that police cell and the time Hal disappeared.  Five long years for Cutler – but to a man who's lived five hundred? A mere five years, and the writing must already have been on the wall.

"So it was all about you."  Everything was always about Hal.  Cutler flings open the next door just so he doesn't have to see the smugness on the bastard's face.

Hal's lying flat on his back.  Somehow, he's managing to look bored, in spite of the fact that there's a woman bouncing enthusiastically up and down on his cock – and that just makes her work harder.  Cutler knows how she feels.

He didn't manage to find a woman of his own tonight.  So he squirms in the armchair, and uncrosses his legs, and he absolutely does not watch what's happening on the bed.  Cutler waits, hoping it will be over soon, hoping for scraps – but of what, he couldn't exactly say.  Hal is looking at him: lying there and looking right at him, and then shifting his gaze to where he's sliding in and out of her.

"Is this what you wanted?" Hal asks.

"No," Cutler yelps.  Not knowingly, anyway.

"But you thought about it," Hal presses – and maybe Cutler did wonder, a little, somewhere in the back of his mind.

"Is this what you want?" Hal asks, his voice shivering on the nape of Cutler's neck, his hands trailing goose flesh across Cutler's shoulders and down his arms.  But this isn't the way it happened – this Cutler would have remembered.  He shakes Hal off.  It's too weird, another kind of masturbation, and he had enough of that while he was alive.

"Is it just me," Hal smirks, in the chill of the corridor, "or is it hot in here?"

But Cutler has enough regrets without inventing new ones.

The pub again, and this time Cutler is the centre of attention.  A sheepish Louis follows him through the door, and the boys give them a cheer.  Give Cutler a cheer.  Some of them actually slap him on the back and press drinks into his hand.  Even Fergus can't help smiling, now that his favourite recruit has been rescued from the toils of the law.  Rescued by Cutler, the hero of the hour, and for the first time in far too long his smile isn't forced.  Then he sees Hal's mouth twist into a sneer.  Old pain flares.  Anger, too: no matter what Hal says, or what he thinks, Cutler is very good at his job.  

"Didn't daddy show you enough love?" Hal taunts.

"You're a dick," Cutler tells him, because Hal will never approve if he's determined not to – and, really, that says more about Hal than it does about him.  It's amazing that he never saw it before.  Death, Cutler is starting to realise, gives a man a new perspective on life.

Door after door after door after door.  Cutler has no idea if he's been here an hour or a year.  A lifetime, it feels like, and a long one at that.  Hal keeps following him, grinning that same grin, and it isn't even funny any more.  This might just be the start of forever, and he wonders how long it will be before he goes mad – if he hasn't already.  What else is he supposed to think when he's being tormented by a figment of his imagination?

The door gapes blackly and exhales its sticky sweetness.  Cutler doesn't want to go forwards; he tries to go back, but Dennis has a grip like a vice and he's inside before he has a chance to dig in his heels.  He sees the white of Hal's teeth in the gloom, a flash of cuff as the man reaches for the switch.  This is all Hal's doing, all Hal's fault, but Cutler doesn't want to have to look his dead wife in the face, and he thrashes with panicked strength.  He wins free; he scrambles out – just as the light clicks on.

Hal's grin is vicious, and Cutler's going to punch that look right off his face.

"I should have killed you," he snarls.  Maybe then he could have saved her.

Doors and doors and doors.  Cutler smothers a woman's struggles with his weight.  She doesn't struggle for long, and he turns to Fergus to ask for a hand with the body.  But Fergus isn't there.  No one is.  It's just him and her: his kill, the woman he decided to kill – except it wasn't exactly a decision, more an impulse.  An irresistible urge.  And, anyway, she'd have run to the police, so it's her own fault she ended up like this.  The blood helps to drown the remorse.

"Making a virtue of necessity?" Hal asks.

Cutler strides away: away from Hal, away from the awkward questions that he just can't answer – doesn't want to answer.  He strides away, but the walls are pressing in on him, and the floor tilts unsteadily.  He presses his back against the wall.  His legs won't brace him up, and his backside hits the floor with a pathetic little thud.  Hal is standing over him, and Cutler considers sticking is fingers in his ears and going _la-la-la_.  It's been a long time since he was bothered by the thought of looking childish.

"There's no point in trying to hide," Hal says.

But Cutler's bone weary.  He's not sure that he can go on; he's damn sure that he doesn't want to.

"You can't stay here forever," Hal tells him.

"Why not?"

But when Hal sets off again Cutler follows.

Full moon: laughter, shouting, a drunken hunger for violence.  The noise is muffled here in the office, but it's clear the audience are getting restless.  If they haven't already guessed that something's wrong, then they soon will.

"Hal's dead."  It's a blunt statement; Fergus is a blunt sort of man.

Cutler shocks him by refusing to join the gang they send to hunt down the dog responsible.  Cutler shocks himself, as well.  It's not that he doesn't care, but there's a whole new world of possibilities spreading itself, bewilderingly, at his feet.  A chance to step out of Hal's shadow, to wash the blood from his hands.

"What do we do now?" Cutler asks.

"And just what did you do with your new-found freedom?" Hal enquires, and it's always possible that he genuinely doesn't know.  Cutler sometimes forgets that his interest in Hal was a little one-sided.

Cutler's spade bites into the earth.  They're in Wales again – no, that's not quite true.  That would imply that he ever left.  Inertia: without Hal, one place is as good as any other.  The soil is waterlogged, and Cutler's starting to sweat.  The hole is far too shallow, but he wipes the worst of the dirt onto his handkerchief and he rolls the coroner in.

"Sloppy," Hal pontificates from the grave side, and it's like the last fifty-five years never happened.  It's possible that Cutler wishes they hadn't.  An homage, he called it.  Nostalgia.  He was re-living the past, even then.  But he's determined to move on now – on down that corridor – even if it's too late to do him any good.

"Who made you do it that time?" Hal calls after him.

"She –"  She made him do it, Cutler wants to say.  She made him lose his temper.  Hal grins as though this is all Cutler's fault, when it's actually his: he never told Cutler that it was possible to endure the hunger.

Another door, leading into the warehouse.  Stoker's: that's what some comedian named it.  Hal would not have approved.  He would never have lowered himself to read a vampire novel.  But Hal isn't thinking about literature, not now: his mind is on something far more urgent, and his eyes keep being drawn towards the decanter.  Cutler watches Hal sweat, a flinching shadow of the tyrant who used to rule Cutler's world, and it hits him with the burning certainty of a revelation: Hal Yorke is just a man.  And the only power he ever had is what Cutler gave him.

"Perhaps I can help," Hal offers, and hope wells and thickens in Cutler's throat.

Hal's a mess, but he's alive.  It's possible to stay dry, even for an Old One.  It was possible all along: for Hal, for him.  For both of them together.  It still is possible.  But Hal shattered his whole existence once, and Cutler can't let him do it again.  They've gone too far, done too much, and Cutler's spent too long with his memories to be able to forget.

"Old times," Cutler says.  He holds out a glass, and Hal collaborates in his own undoing as surely as Cutler ever did in his.  As simply as that, the two of them change places.

"Congratulations."  Hal toasts him with a grin.  "I always knew you had it in you."

"I'm just returning the favour," Cutler says.

Another door, and Cutler knows what lies behind it even before he's turned the handle.  This time, he doesn't wait to be pushed across the threshold.  This time, he walks into the darkness and the waft of blood.  This time, it's Cutler who reaches for the switch and floods the room with pitiless light.  And there's the tubing and the bottles, but it's the Scottish girl who's hanging there, not Rachel on her bed of wire.

Laughter chokes its way out of him, because suddenly it's all so obvious.  This was never about Rachel.  It was about him, and that makes him just as egotistical as Hal, in his own way.  This is about him and Hal, and everything that's been festering between them for all these years.  Cutler laughs harder when he sees the shock, the guilt, on his maker's face, but it isn't enough – nothing can ever be enough.  No matter what he does, no matter who he kills, he can't wash his wife's blood out of his throat.

"There aren't words," Hal chuckles, "to tell you how sorry I am."

Then Cutler's fist cracks into Hal's face, and he's falling.  Bone against bone, and Cutler's knuckles really hurt, but it's worth it.

"Well," Hal gasps, "do you feel better now?"

Against all the odds, Cutler does.  Because now, at least, he knows.  He knows that he's the sort of man to feed a tube into a girl's artery, to watch as the life spurts out of her.  To laugh as Hal gulps it down.  He knows that making history repeat itself was never going to bring Rachel back.

"I'm going now."  Cutler looks down at Hal and, Christ, he's still grinning through his mask of blood.  "And you're not going to follow me."

He waits for Hal to fling some last barb, to somehow be on his feet and ahead of him at the door, but Hal just lies on the floor and wheezes through a nose full of blood.  Cutler walks away, and it ought to feel like freedom.  He opens the door.

He's not sure what he's expecting.  Something dramatic, probably: a glorious light, a choir of angels – or flames and red-hot pokers.  An end to this in-between.  But the corridor stretches away on either side, until it's lost in darkness.  Cutler closes the door behind him.  He half expects that Hal will push his way through it, but the door stays closed.

So this is it, then.  It's just him and the corridor, and there's nothing there to frighten him any more, because the monster isn't out there, it's in here, wearing his skin.  An infinity of doors.  Cutler turns to the closest: the path of least resistance.  The story of his life, and now the story of his death.  He rests his fingers on the handle.

"Cutler?"

He turns towards where the corridor is no longer empty.  "Oh, come on – again?"  Hysteria is bleeding through into his voice.  "You really need to get some new material."  Because he doesn't need Hal any more.

Need, want, deserve.  Maybe they deserve each other: they're two of a kind.

"Cutler?"  Hal's repeating himself; his eyes are wide and startled.  There's no sign of that bloody grin, no sign at all, and maybe, just maybe –

"Hal?" he asks.  "Is it really you?"  
   


End file.
